This might be words toward a possible
song. Or maybe it’s just a bit of verse and will go no further. A
bit of unlike me, either way. Anyway, neither the poem nor its title should be considered finalized.

Monday, August 25, 2014

Peach season is over but that only
means that it is time for pears. And I have plenty of them, the
hard(ish) cooking pears. Not that one can’t eat them fresh, though
it is best if one removes the heavy peel first.

I processed my first batch of them a
few days ago, cooking up the slices mostly to see how they would come
out and if I wanted to bother with an attempt at canning. I must say,
the result had about as much flavor as paper and was not much
sweeter. So I ran them through the food processor to see if they
would be acceptable as sauce.

Now I use a fair amount of apple sauce
in my baking — it is a good and somewhat healthful substitute for some of
the sugar and shortening (incidentally, I also employ prune juice in
this manner at times). I tried out my pear sauce as a replacement and
it seemed to bake up quite nicely and taste fine. However, the spice
bread I made was definitely drier than usual the next day, so I
suppose the pears are not a perfect substitute.

But I may process more anyway, and put
up some slices as well. I don’t know if I’ll bother to can
though, just freeze a few quarts. And I will be baking something with
fresh pears soon. It’s been too hot here the last week to bake at
all!

I reckon this was probably the worst
heat wave of the summer and, truly, the only really bad one we have
had. That’s not doing so bad considering we are entering late
August already. Yep, fall is on the way and kids are back in school.
That means both more chance of surf and fewer people in the water
when there are waves.

If I did not so detest cold weather, I
would be welcoming the coming of winter.

Yesterday, I picked the last half-dozen
peaches from my trees. Today, I shall bake the last cobbler from
fresh peaches for this year. Never fear, though, there are twenty
quarts put away in the freezer. The crop should grow larger over
coming years — this was, after all, really the first time I had
enough to bother with them. I do think I shall need to can them next
year or, maybe, purchase a small chest freezer.

Now, the pears are about ready. There
will be an attempt to can a few of those, perhaps in the form of pear
sauce. No room for frozen ones! It may be a while before I have more
than the one old tree bearing but I have put in several small ones
that will have fruit eventually. These are the ‘hard’ pears for
cooking, not for fresh eating (though one certainly can eat them
right off the tree).

* * *

I’ve taken a little hiatus from
working on the novel while I attend to other necessary chores. This
does not mean that I have forgotten it — I find myself jotting down
ideas and bits of dialog from time to time. I probably needed to let
the story develop in my mind this way for a little while. I am not
one to just sit down and start writing without a good idea of where I
am going.

And I continue to use Open Office Write
as my primary word processor. I am sure Libre Office is every bit as
good. I did come close to switching over when development of OO came
to a halt for a while before it was handed over to Apache and elements
of IBM’s Lotus variant were added in.

But the Open Office suite is, it must
be admitted, rather bloated. I don’t really need most of the other
components. I have fooled with the spreadsheet but haven’t much use
for it. The Draw program is okay for some simple layout applications
but, then, I have and use Corel Draw quite a bit so I don’t really
need the OO offering.

I tried out AbiWord recently to see if
using a ‘lighter’ word processing program (especially on my
notebook) would make sense but have since deleted it. The reason
might seem trivial but it boils down to the fact that AbiWord will
not automatically add en-dashes and em-dashes to my writing. I do not
have time to type in an ‘alt+’ code each time I need these.
Still, it is better than using the execrable Microsoft WordPad!

* * *

Although I am officially retired from
location recording, I may come out of that retirement briefly and go
record my friend Lynda’s piano recital out in Marshall Texas. She
left Tuskegee a couple years ago and now teaches at Wiley College. We
briefly lost touch while each dealt with the problems in our own
lives (I was concentrating on my mom’s care in her final years) but
got back into contact around last Christmas.

It’s an opportunity to get out and do
something and to reconnect with someone who is important in my life.
So we shall see.

Just some silliness. I have been baking cobblers with fruit from my own trees --- despite pinching off more than half the fruit when it first developed I still have a prodigious pile of peaches to pit and peel!